{"id":400,"date":"2006-01-13T16:52:20","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T20:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=400"},"modified":"2006-01-13T16:54:04","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T20:54:04","slug":"the-darkening-ecliptic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/13\/the-darkening-ecliptic\/","title":{"rendered":"The Darkening Ecliptic"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have no interest in commenting on the current book frauds. The blogosphere has both James Frey<\/a> and JT Leroy<\/a> covered.<\/p>\n

However, I do want to out Christopher Moore<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Except he already outed himself<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I have to tell you, that James Frey\u2019s admission yesterday that parts of his best-selling, Oprah-blessed biography, A Million Little Pieces, were made up, has cause me to do some soul searching of my own, and now I must confess, that although my books are marketed as fiction, and there are disclaimers all over the place to that effect, parts of them are totally true, factual, and not made up at all.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t called Oprah to break the news to her, but I have a call into her people, who assure me that my call will be answered in the order that it was received, and I really don\u2019t mind listening to Maya Angelou reading the lyrics to The Girl From Ipanema while I\u2019m on hold. (I love French Americans and I have been a fan of Miss Gelou\u2019s work ever since she served as Surgeon General for the Clinton Administration.) Still, I can\u2019t help but think that Oprah will be disappointed, and will, in fact, have to call Dr. Phil to console her. (\u201cPhil, I was ignoring that motherfucker for other reasons altogether, now I find out that he hasn\u2019t made all of that nonsense up. I\u2019m distraught. Steadman make me a pie, bitch!\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

… and lots more of the funny at that post.<\/p>\n

Of course the literary fraud is hardly a new thing, as an article yesterday at the CBC points out, listing ten of the best literary hoaxes<\/a> of history.<\/p>\n

I’ll quote a couple here to get you interested:<\/p>\n

Scotland\u2019s Homer<\/strong>
\nWhile Chatterton was fooling the Brits, a Scottish schoolmaster named James Macpherson produced \u201ctranslations\u201d of the Gaelic verse of third-century epic poet Ossian, whose stories of heroism and love wowed primitivists like Napoleon and Goethe. Though there were some early skeptics \u2014 Samuel Johnson among them \u2014 it took almost another century before the translations were proven to be fake.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Go Ask Alice<\/strong>
\nThis 1971 \u201cactual diary\u201d of a teenaged girl who died of a drug overdose was meant to be a cautionary tale for adolescents in the post-hippie era. In the late 1970s, however, its \u201ceditor,\u201d Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist and Mormon youth counsellor, admitted to writing it based on the stories of some of her students. Sparks has gone on to produce many other \u201cactual diaries\u201d about troubled adolescents, including Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager<\/em> and Annie’s Baby: The Diary of an Anonymous Pregnant Teenager<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have no interest in commenting on the current book frauds. The blogosphere has both James Frey and JT Leroy covered. However, I do want to out Christopher Moore. Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-6s","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}